Practical teaching tools for use with #Twitter #edtech

Maybe you don’t have access to Moodle, or maybe your students are too cool to use it, so you think that Twitter might work. If so, here are 2 tools that can help.

Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.cpm) is the best to start with as it allows you to share resources easily, taking you above the 140 character limit of Twitter and basic web links. The main reason it is so useful is its ow.ly link shortener with click tracking, When you add a web link to a tweet it is automatically shortened and then any clicks are sent to a report. Obviously you can’t see who clicked, but you will have an idea of usage. You can also use Hootsuite to send documents to your students with a couple of clicks.

Hootsuite’s scheduler is also great for ‘course’ management as you can set up a whole set of dates and automatic reminders at the beginning of term and not have to remember to send them again.

If you have a large course, or if your students don’t want to follow each other you can use a second service to target your tweets. You can connect your Twitter account to Roundteam (https://roundteam.co/examples) and it will automatically retweet specified messages. In the case of a class all members would only have to follow the account connected to Roundteam. Roundteam then retweets any tweets that are specifically addressed to it, to all of the students who are followers. This way you can help students easily separate their academic and social use of Twitter and simplify communication between them.